[ANNOUNCE] New alternate cryptocurrency - Geist Geld

[Isepick]

I've been getting the NTP error on my main machine every few hours. Every time I stop GG, resync time with time.nist.gov, and then restart. I really don't think my machine is slipping that far in that short amount of time. I don't necessarily have to resync on the the time, either. I do it just in case tho

Running Win 7 x64, btw.

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[Lolcust]

Lolcust, I think you have to update the gg zips so the NTP=1 flag is used by default. Just in case people miss to change this in the config.
Getinfo says "errors" : "Warning: A majority of peers disagree with NTP time. Something is off here!" again.

Did that yesterday (and checked, and re-checked now yet again)

Everything has proper config.

Basically, there are two explanations
1) you get connected to an ntp server that is full of HATE (which would be strange, given that Geist only yanks  them once an hour, which is verily nice of it)
2) there are a bunch of miners who ignore NTP (don't visit the forum too often) and just blast away, and you happen to occasionally get connected preferentially to them.

Which sort of gives me an idea for yet another thing for the todo list...

Any way to check what ntp server I'm connected to?

Hm, I'll see what can be done.

I've been getting the NTP error on my main machine every few hours. Every time I stop GG, resync time with time.nist.gov, and then restart. I really don't think my machine is slipping that far in that short amount of time. I don't necessarily have to resync on the the time, either. I do it just in case tho

Running Win 7 x64, btw.

Resync of system time won't do anything because if NTP=1, then Geist abandons system time and does its best to stick to NTP values.

Geist's NTP neither messes with, nor cares for, your Windows system time.

What I suspect is that there are  5-7 dudes who don't care about updates (Connections ? check. Miner running ? check. Are there accepted blocks? CHECK!)  who never bothered with the ntp thingamabobble (or just don't know about it) and just blast away, and given that currently there are exactly 22 folks mining Geist (which makes the diff of 112 more impressive) the probability of ending in the preferential company of "those people" isn't that low.

Geist needs a way to start nagging and begging for updates when updates come...food for thought...

[Isepick]

Good to know, thanks. Now I won't worry that I am somehow off on my time. Non-scientifically when this happened yesterday my last 10 transactions listed were all orphaned blocks. After I stopped and restarted GG I started getting 'immature' again. Again, that is anecdotally and I haven't run any significant comparisons to see. I may have to spend a bit of time this evening and try to test this out a bit more.

[Cosbycoin]

I was doing some thinking and GG is only going to gain value if there is a slew of people trying to mine it at the same time, otherwise there is no demand or competition for it.

Since the supply rate is basically a steady rate we can therefore assume that the more people wanting to mine GG the less each person will get in say a pool mining operation for GG.

[Lolcust]

I was doing some thinking and GG is only going to gain value if there is a slew of people trying to mine it at the same time, otherwise there is no demand or competition for it.

Since the supply rate is basically a steady rate we can therefore assume that the more people wanting to mine GG the less each person will get in say a pool mining operation for GG.

Unless I misunderstand you, that seems to hold true for every "cryptocoin". Their value tends to correlate with mining competitiveness (though is not, of course, directly related to it, otherwise BTC would have been, much, much more expensive than even its "bubble peak" price) and the more people want to mine in a pooled setup, the less they receive per block (but the more users a pool gets, the more blocks it has, unless it hits some scalability wall in the way pooling is implemented in a given pool for a given coin, and by far this, and not block propagation or potential for godlike blockchain size, is what most concerns me about Geist's design)

[Lolcust]

Is their any pool to mine?
Also any pool to exchange GG to BTC or any other currency?

Not yet, but it is coming.

Both a pool and an exchange.

As I already said, I am greatly interested in how geist behaves with pools (and trying to cobble together a pool-friendlier version) and am looking forward to the official deployment of the pool (and the insights that its successes and failures will hopefully bring)

[Isepick]

Eleuthria, the owner of BTC Guild, has ran a few alt coin pools rather successfully. Although SC probably left a bad taste in his mouth. Might want to talk to him and see if he is game.

[Syke]

I'm impressed. I thought with such fast blocks there would be more orphans. I'm seeing only 2%. The frequent difficulty adjustments are also great. Miners come and leave and the difficulty adjusts real fast. Someone's got to do a block explorer so we can see how the blocks are coming. We're at 13000 blocks. Exactly when was this chain started?

[Lolcust]

Eleuthria, the owner of BTC Guild, has ran a few alt coin pools rather successfully. Although SC probably left a bad taste in his mouth. Might want to talk to him and see if he is game.

I will as soon as I get the (slightly) pool optimized version   compile

I'm impressed. I thought with such fast blocks there would be more orphans. I'm seeing only 2%. The frequent difficulty adjustments are also great. Miners come and leave and the difficulty adjusts real fast. Someone's got to do a block explorer so we can see how the blocks are coming. We're at 13000 blocks. Exactly when was this chain started?

September 13, 2011, 12:38:49 PM

Also, there was a guy who claimed that at least  as far as network latency is concerned, 2s blocks should be sustainable (and had some calc as proof, though being a graphic designer with a side dish of smuggler, I can't attest to the validity of mathemagic he had there), though I think that it's a mite overkill. 15s/block is actually plenty fast (I've had paypal transfers that linger for a full minute, but that's probably due to all fraud checks)

[Lolcust]

Also, there was a guy who claimed that at least  as far as network latency is concerned, 2s blocks should be sustainable (and had some calc as proof, though being a graphic designer with a side dish of smuggler, I can't attest to the validity of mathemagic he had there), though I think that it's a mite overkill. 15s/block is actually plenty fast (I've had paypal transfers that linger for a full minute, but that's probably due to all fraud checks)

I would agree, we need to see real life data on the effects of extremely short blocks and 15s assuming there becomes no adverse side effects as the network grows sufficiently large will provide a lot of really good data to help determine optimal rates.  I look forward to seeing this as the network grows both to miners and consumers.  Even at 15s it brings transactions much closer to the speed of plastic (assuming people don't get start assuming they need 10000 confirmations to accept a transaction rofl - btw do you have a set minimum transaction count?)

You mean as in "count at which listtransactions displays transaction", or some shenanigan that will remind the user that accepting 0/unconfirmed is a Really Bad Idea?


Also, plastic transactions can not that far from 15 sec boundary, depending on arcane intricacies of a given country's banking system operation and current state of affairs in a given bank's automation (During my visit to Germany I once had to wait in line for whole extra 5 minutes because a guy's credit card was extra-thoughtful)

P.S.:
online plastic is way above 15 seconds if we're not talking about a system when you "pre-bind" a credit card long before actually transacting (ala paypal) and include the hassle of entering all them numberses, CC-somethings and address into relevant field (which we probably should)

[Syke]

September 13, 2011, 12:38:49 PM

56 hrs ago? 13200 blocks in 56 hours is nearly a block every 6 seconds. I thought this was still targetting 15 second blocks.

[Lolcust]

September 13, 2011, 12:38:49 PM

56 hrs ago? 13200 blocks in 56 hours is nearly a block every 6 seconds. I thought this was still targetting 15 second blocks.

56*60= 3360 minutes
3360 minutes * 60 = 201600 seconds

201600 seconds / 13191 blocks = 15,2 seconds per block.

We're on schedule, lol

[Syke]

56*60= 3360 minutes
3360 minutes * 60 = 201600 seconds

201600 seconds / 13191 blocks = 15,2 seconds per block.

We're on schedule, lol

Ok, that looks much better. That's very good it's sticking so close to projections.

[Lolcust]

You mean as in "count at which listtransactions displays transaction", or some shenanigan that will remind the user that accepting 0/unconfirmed is a Really Bad Idea?


Also, plastic transactions can not that far from 15 sec boundary, depending on arcane intricacies of a given country's banking system operation and current state of affairs in a given bank's automation (During my visit to Germany I once had to wait in line for whole extra 5 minutes because a guy's credit card was extra-thoughtful)

P.S.:
online plastic is way above 15 seconds if we're not talking about a system when you "pre-bind" a credit card long before actually transacting (ala paypal) and include the hassle of entering all them numberses, CC-somethings and address into relevant field (which we probably should)

1) Yes

2 and 3)  But there should be a minimum transaction count no?  at 10 it's a nice ~2 mins and within the speed of plastic, if merchants need 100 transactions because of the rediculous unfounded notion that it's all about time and not network dispersion then your back up at 25 mins which would be slower than the speed of plastic.

I think I don't "get" the question. The daemon will, of course, display transactions starting from 0 and up

If what you are asking is "does Geist's security differ from Bitcoin's in terms of validation count required to consider a transaction set in the motherlovin' stone", then actually that is an interesting question to investigate, but I see no reason why math that holds for 10 min blocks won't hold for 15 sec blocks (yes, blocks are "easier" - but the time window in which you have to feed them to the victim is very much narrower, and due to the NTP thing and the narrowed down accept window, the ability to get coy with block time data is    limited too, so it should even out)

So far, I see no reason to consider a confirmation in Geist any different in terms of reliability from a confirmation in any network.

Thus, 1 is neat, 2 is secure, 3 is verily secure, everything above 3 even more secure to the point of paranoia at 6 and "you should probably buy something on Silk Road" at above 6

What I am more interested is how a narrowed-down time window affects the Finney attack (the famous one with just one confirm).
In an idealized setting, it probably should not affect it, because smaller attack time window is evened out by a "simpler" block, but methinks in a practical way it should be different because the border of Finney's attack time window is now much, much  closer to the moment where a "real life" merchant is likely to start delivering digital goods (IRL downloadable goods aren't delivered "instantly" as well)

[2112]

Thus, 1 is neat, 2 is secure, 3 is verily secure, everything above 3 even more secure to the point of paranoia at 6 and "you should probably buy something on Silk Road" at above 6

You need to run your Geist Gold proxied through Tor to understand why you are wrong. Satoshi was probably over-conservative. You are certainly over-optimistic.

[Lolcust]

Thus, 1 is neat, 2 is secure, 3 is verily secure, everything above 3 even more secure to the point of paranoia at 6 and "you should probably buy something on Silk Road" at above 6

You need to run your Geist Gold proxied through Tor to understand why you are wrong. Satoshi was probably over-conservative. You are certainly over-optimistic.

It's entirely possible that I am overly optimistic, but I believe it would be most wonderful if one was to provide a somewhat  more elaborate explanation as to why so and which values would be reasonable to consider secure (a somewhat more elaborate argument is especially welcome in cases where certainty is claimed)

P.S.:
Geist isn't yet  popular enough for some tor dude to try to do a POSR against a Geist transaction even assuming such opportunity exists   so that would be a particularly poor way to determine transaction safety

P.P.S.:
As a matter of fact, the Geist miner on my ghettobox is connected through TOR, and it is from there that I have sent some geists to folks. To the best of my knowledge, not a single unit went AWOL (though as I said above, that hardly demonstrates anything except "this particular transaction worked out, lol" )

[Cosbycoin]

Looks like at current block rate and diff there is betwen 40 and 60 GH/s on GG network.

At somepoint more GH/s I would think would not create faster blocks because of collisions in hash solving times that produce stales.

Any input?

[2112]

As a matter of fact, the Geist miner on my ghettobox is connected through TOR, and it is from there that I have sent some geists to folks. To the best of my knowledge, not a single unit went AWOL (though as I said above, that hardly demonstrates anything except "this particular transaction worked out, lol" )

Basically, the standard deviation of time-delay over Tor (or probably any other anonymity network, eg. I2P) is too close to the deviation limits in your protocol. You will probably experience this once you gather more information to gather meaningful statistics.

It isn't really affecting the security of the protocol, you are right about this. It is affecting the useability of the client, especially its ability to startup and resynchronize after period of time online.

I'm thinking that you just got lucky (low variance) with Tor recently. Have you tried, eg. browsing this forum through Tor?

Edited to add: Oh I'm sorry I forgot to mention: the true test of Tor is connecting to a hidden service "*.onion". The ususal connection to the clearweb only tests less than half of the privacy stack. The complete variance is "from you to a rendezvous-point"+"rendezvous-point name resolution"+"from rendezvous-point to the counterparty". I keep forgetting about this.

[Lolcust]

As a matter of fact, the Geist miner on my ghettobox is connected through TOR, and it is from there that I have sent some geists to folks. To the best of my knowledge, not a single unit went AWOL (though as I said above, that hardly demonstrates anything except "this particular transaction worked out, lol" )

Basically, the standard deviation of time-delay over Tor (or probably any other anonymity network, eg. I2P) is too close to the deviation limits in your protocol. You will probably experience this once you gather more information to gather meaningful statistics.
 .

Hm, so, to put it in terms a guy who draws pictures for a living  has easier time with, I will get block propagation issues in the form of my freshly mined blocks   falling too much behind and ending up outside the 10 second window, thus getting rejected by network ?  

I guess that could be easily tested by having one of the multi-gigahash dudes trying to mine through TOR and mining for 10 mins, then through I2P's cancerous outproxy and mine for 10 mins, then directly and again 10 mins. We could compare the number of blocks accepted by the net and see if TOR or I2P result in notable loss.

It isn't really affecting the security of the protocol, you are right about this. It is affecting the useability of the client, especially its ability to startup and resynchronize after period of time online.

Ah, sorry then. I sort of assumed you were referring to my post about validations when you said I'm overly optimistic (primarily because you quoted it )

Yes, downloading all them blocks through tor won't be pretty, but it's not like this isn't a problem Bitcoin will inevitably face    (so we might as well try out various solutions on Geist which will face it earlier). For one, unless you intend to mine or feel like being a Coin Historian, there is little practical need for getting the entire goddamned huge chain (there is a "lean" client for Bitcoin already and I think that there might be ways to make it even somewhat leaner)

I'm thinking that you just got lucky (low variance) with Tor recently. Have you tried, eg. browsing this forum through Tor?.

I am, like right now.

I am from Belarus.

TOR is not nice but hey, you see my response right ? So mission accomplished *bush pic*
 

[Lolcust]

Looks like at current block rate and diff there is betwen 40 and 60 GH/s on GG network.

At somepoint more GH/s I would think would not create faster blocks because of collisions in hash solving times that produce stales.

Any input?

Are we talking stales as in Stale Shares, which implies a pool, or are we talking stales in the general sense of PoW submitted too late, which I think in case of "blocks" is usually called orphans ?